Ranson's Folly eBook

The Consolidated Press, being a mighty corporation,
which daily fed seven hundred different newspapers,
could not hope to please the policy of each, so it
compromised by giving the facts of the day fairly
set down, without heat, prejudice, or enthusiasm.
This was an excellent arrangement for the papers that
subscribed for the service of the Consolidated Press,
but it was death to the literary strivings of the
Consolidated Press correspondents.

“We do not want descriptive writing,”
was the warning which the manager of the great syndicate
was always flashing to its correspondents. “We
do not pay you to send us pen-pictures or prose poems.
We want the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the
facts.”

And so, when at a presidential convention a theatrical
speaker sat down after calling James G. Blaine “a
plumed knight,” each of the “special”
correspondents present wrote two columns in an effort
to describe how the people who heard the speech behaved
in consequence, but the Consolidated Press man telegraphed,
“At the conclusion of these remarks the cheering
lasted sixteen minutes.”

No event of news value was too insignificant to escape
the watchfulness of the Consolidated Press, none so
great that it could not handle it from its inception
up to the moment when it ceased to be quoted in the
news-market of the world. Each night, from thousands
of spots all over the surface of the globe, it received
thousands of facts, of cold, accomplished facts.
It knew that a tidal wave had swept through China,
a cabinet had changed in Chili, in Texas an express
train had been held up and robbed, “Spike”
Kennedy had defeated the “Dutchman” in
New Orleans, the Oregon had coaled outside of Rio
Janeiro Harbor, the Cape Verde fleet had been seen
at anchor off Cadiz; it had been located in the harbor
of San Juan, Porto Rico; it had been sighted steaming
slowly past Fortress Monroe; and the Navy Department
reported that the St. Paul had discovered the lost
squadron of Spain in the harbor of Santiago. This
last fact was the one which sent Keating to Jamaica.
Where he was sent was a matter of indifference to
Keating. He had worn the collar of the Consolidated
Press for so long a time that he was callous.
A board meeting—­a mine disaster—­an
Indian uprising—­it was all one to Keating.
He collected facts and his salary. He had no
enthusiasms, he held no illusions. The prestige
of the mammoth syndicate he represented gained him
an audience where men who wrote for one paper only
were repulsed on the threshold. Senators, governors,
the presidents of great trusts and railroad systems,
who fled from the reporter of a local paper as from
a leper, would send for Keating and dictate to him
whatever it was they wanted the people of the United
States to believe, for when they talked to Keating
they talked to many millions of readers. Keating,
in turn, wrote out what they had said to him and transmitted
it, without color or bias, to the clearinghouse of
the Consolidated Press. His “stories,”
as all newspaper writings are called by men who write
them, were as picturesque reading as the quotations
of a stock-ticker. The personal equation appeared
no more offensively than it does in a page of typewriting
in his work.